Abstract
Like other syntactic elements, affixes are sometimes said to be heads or modifiers. In Russian, one suffix,-onok, can be either: as a head, it is a size diminutive denoting baby animals, and as a modifier, it is an evaluative with a dismissive/affectionate flavor. Various grammatical properties of this suffix differ between the two uses: gender, declension class, and interaction with suppletive alternations, both as target and trigger. We explore a reductionist account of these differences: the baby diminutive comprises a lexical morpheme plus a functional nominalizing head, while the evaluative affix is the lexical morpheme alone. We contend that our account is superior to two conceivable alternatives: first, the view that these are homophonous but unrelated affixes, and second, a cartographic alternative, whereby diminutives attach at different levels in a universal structure.
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Notes
We transcribe Russian examples in IPA throughout, since phonological properties are a component of our argument. Examples from other languages, such as German and Italian, are given in conventional orthography, as the phonology is not crucial.
These representations incorporate the assumptions that roots lack syntactic category (Borer 2003; inter alia) and gender features (Acquaviva 2008b; Kramer 2015), and that these are provided by a categorizing affix, a null little n in the instances at hand. We return to this point and some other properties of Italian diminutives in Sect. 3.3, as they become relevant to our discussion of Russian -onok. For the purposes of labeling, we treat inflectional affixes as not contributing features.
The analysis of mutation is a thorny problem in Russian phonology, and we will not solve it here. For example, both -onok and -at cause the same exact mutations and are both auto-stressing. That both affixes cause the same mutations is not unusual—several other suffixes (e.g., adjectival formatives) cause similar changes. Suffixes do vary in the details of changes they cause; thus, the alternations triggered by verbal suffixes differ from those of diminutives, and even diminutives vary (for example, the diminutive -ok causes mutation on velars (as in [bɨk∼bɨtɕ-ók] ‘bull (+dim)’), but not on labials (e.g., [dub∼dub-ók] ‘oak (+dim),’ [
∼
] ‘pigeon (+dim)’). Moreover, both the targets and the undergoers for the various mutations are lexically specific; cf. [
]∼[
] ‘bear (+baby.dim)’ vs. [
]∼[
] ‘swan (+baby.dim).’ This lexical specificity can be analyzed in terms of readjustment rules where both the undergoer and the trigger bear diacritic features. Each suffix can potentially bear multiple diacritics that go with separate rules: thus, both -onok and -at would be indexed for velar mutation, non-velar palatalization, etc. But -ok would be indexed for velar mutation only. Importantly, while -onok and -at share readjustment rule diacritics, they belong to different declension classes, as we show later—thus, their morpho-phonological diacritics overlap but are not identical.We do not intend here to adjudicate between views where gender is a property of roots and views where roots are gender-neutral and nouns acquire gender when the root combines with a categorizing n head, though we have opted for the latter in our representations. Advocates of this perspective typically invoke licensing conditions on roots (see Acquaviva 2008b; and for a more developed approach, Kramer 2015). An issue this raises is how to ensure that an animal-name root is only licensed with one particular n when it refers to an adult animal, while allowing practically any animal-naming root to combine with the masculine -onok. For example, combinations of the root [ut-] ‘duck’ with other-gender ns is undefined: *[ut-Ø] (intended masc.), *[ut-o]. Licensing proposals do not provide a ready means to capture this systematicity, while specifying gender on roots would.
We would like to thank Alec Marantz for suggesting this approach. Faltýnková and Ziková (2019) offer a nanosyntactic analysis of an etymologically related alternation in Czech; their proposal also includes the idea that the affix is morphologically complex, but differs in many substantive details; the facts of Czech are rather different from Russian.
A search of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) turns up 56 hits for [
], and 38 for [
]. About a third of the latter are scanning errors (where <
> appears in the context where <
> ‘assessments’ is expected); quite a few of the remaining ones are in older texts from the 19th century.The only exception is [
] ‘piglet’: the adult-root counterpart [
] occurs in the RNC a handful of times, but interestingly, only one of the uses means ‘piglet’; the rest are epithets for a young dirty boy.Yet another alternative would be to give up on suppletion here, and treat the roots as near-synonyms. This would have the challenges of explaining the blocking effects, and the lack of doublets for most of the forms in (14).
Transparency to gender percolation is not strictly correlated across languages with inability to host non-compositional interpretations: De Belder et al. (2014) treat lexicalized Italian diminutives, for example, as modifiers (in our terms) attaching between the root and the first categorizing head.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to the issue of compounds. Compound -onok nouns are not listed in dictionaries—most are hapax legomena; we found these in ad hoc internet searches.
Russian has many diminutives, as noted earlier, and we do not consider them all allomorphs of the same morpheme. Some of them, including unstressed [-ok], have been reported to alternate between evaluative and head use (Steriopolo 2014), but as Steriopolo observes, head [-ok] is a feminine-forming nominalizer, not a baby diminutive.
On the distinction between sex and notional gender, see e.g., McConnell-Ginet (2014) and work cited there.
The Class Ib endings here are understandable on historical grounds: prior to the suppletive -onok∼ -at alternation, these nouns were all neuters. The baby diminutive-forming suffix is reconstructed as -ent (Trubachev 1960); morpho-phonological changes left this as just
in the nominative (and accusative) singular, and 
elsewhere. This declension is quite parallel to the class Ib en-stems, such as contemporary [
]∼ [imen-a] ‘name (+pl)’; the stem-final nasal vowel gave rise to an [
] alternation. Thanks to Michael Flier for discussion.There are relatively few stems that do this, but a much bigger set shows alternations between bare masculine Class Ia and -k feminine Class II; e.g., [akrobat]∼[akrobat-k-a] ‘acrobat (M/F),’ [tiran]∼[tiran-k-a] ‘tyrant (M/F),’ etc.
This is based on the intuitions of the native speaker co-author and on a search of the RNC. We did not find hits for any feminines with -ata. For the masculines, [
] ‘old men (baby.dim)’ and [
] ‘dudes (baby.dim)’ have one hit each, the former in a ‘poetic license’ context alongside other star-derived expressives referring to old men. ‘Boys’ does occur with -ata, [
] (14 RNC hits), though so does [
] ‘boy-baby.dim-sg.’ Neither is surprising, since a boy is a baby human; additional examples of this sort include [
], [
] (both are double diminutives of sorts, formed on roots for ‘child’ or ‘baby’). See Sect. 5.1 for a discussion of other, more clearly evaluative -ata cases and a possible analysis.We do not aim to account for Italian declension class, but similar cases—such as Spanish—have been attributed to gender-to-declension-class redundancy rules (see Kramer 2015:239 for a proposal). Spanish of course introduces additional complications, which we do not address here.
For completeness, we also searched for [-onok] forms for all these nouns. There were a few evaluative uses of [-onok], even for inanimates such as [
] ‘fist’ (3, 1871–1926) and [
] ‘coat’ (1, 1864)—but these are obsolete today. For animates, clear evaluative uses were few, ranging from 0 (
‘fool’) to 10 (
, mostly early 20th century). There were a few unsurprising baby diminutives for boys, [
] (28, early 1900s), [
] (25, modern). We discuss other evaluatives, such as pluralia tantum (e.g., [
] ‘poems’), in Sect. 5.1; these are inanimate and have what could be Ia ‘bases’ ([stix] ‘poem’). But these evaluatives cannot be singular (where they would be unambiguously masculine), in line with the generalization made here.For these stems, evaluatives are not ruled out outright: both [
] and [
] do occur. So do regular, not purely evaluative, diminutives such as 
‘brother,’ and [
] ‘barracuda-dim.’ The latter form hints at another possible source of productivity differences: stress. In terms of stress, most productive diminutives and evaluatives that combine with feminine stems tend to be recessive, unaccented suffixes—not dominant auto-stressing, like -onok. Perhaps the pressure to keep stress on the base, not uncommon for diminutives could explain the difference (Gilbert 2021 has a recent discussion). But this story would require some subtlety for Russian. The rule of stress shift for -onok is easy to apply, and clearly it does not limit the productivity of the baby version of the suffix. Zaliznjak (1985) notes that Russian suffixes have been shifting over time towards dominance, and Russian has plenty of dominant evaluatives, just usually not on feminines.This refers to a member of a Soviet-era organization for children, similar to American Brownies. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the [
] example. The reviewer suggests that this case is purely evaluative/dismissive, but in most internet hits, it seems that it is reserved for young followers of Navalny: 
. ‘Here, young navalʲnʲata—his followers and supporters—argue about Navalny with their 90-year-old grandpa Lev Aleksandrovich Martynov.’ (https://smotrim.ru/article/2523873. Accessed April 12, 2021.) 
‘
: Political jargon, dismissive. Young follower of Russian politician A.A. Navalny.’ (https://ru.wiktionary.org/. Accessed April 12, 2021.)The diminutive -ok can both precede and follow -onok: /
-ok-onok-ok-a/ [
] ‘hat dim, eval,’ see also Sect. 4.Cinque quotes an observation by Voeykova (1998) that whenever diminutives are stacked, it is the first that takes on the evaluative function, and the second one–the size function. As we have seen already, the productive type of example in (46) is a clear counterexample. One complicating factor that we have already pointed out is that the line between size and evaluative function for some suffixes is rather blurry.
As it happens, [det-/dit-] also occurs with at, but in the singular: [ditʲatko] and [ditʲatʲa], both stylistically marked evaluatives of ‘child.’ These forms are likely fossilized from before the onok suppletion pattern developed and are anomalous in several ways, so we will not attempt to analyze them.
Garde (1998:173) gives these as a complete list of the forms where [-at] replaces [ok] alone, rather than [onok]. The form [ɕɕenók], which is far more frequent in usage than [kutʲonok] ‘puppy’ (1545 hits in the Russian National Corpus for nom.sg vs. 30), is also unique among [onok]∼[ata] pairs in having stress on [ók] (and correspondingly orthographic e rather than ë in the first syllable). Note also that the expected forms [tɕertʲata], [besʲata] ‘little devils’ do exist but are less frequent than the [-en]-extended plurals.
We would like to thank Olga Kagan for discussion of these. See Kagan, Erschler, and Geist (in progress) for an analysis of the -in suffix.
Regarding [ovtsa] ‘sheep’ and [baranina] ‘mutton’: the expected form for ‘lamb’ is [jagnʲátina], based on the baby sheep form. This does not appear to be in wide use, although both the RNC and the internet show some hits. Usually lamb is called mʲaso baraʂ-k-a ‘meat of a lamb-dim.gen.’ Alongside [baranina], we also have [ovtɕ-in-a] ‘sheepskin.’ This is a case of doublets/triplets, not suppletion.
Marvin (2002) and Bachrach and Wagner (2007) explore the intriguing possibility that stress differences could be due to the head/adjunct distinction or similar structural differences, but this analysis cannot be extended to the Russian examples because the patterns are the exact opposite of what would be expected from structural/cyclicity considerations: the adjunct diminutive -ok is stress-dominant in masculines, whereas the head feminine suffix is recessive and systematically unstressed. See Gouskova and Linzen (2015) for more discussion.
∼
] ‘pigeon (+dim)’). Moreover, both the targets and the undergoers for the various mutations are lexically specific; cf. [
]∼[
] ‘bear (+baby.dim)’ vs. [
]∼[
] ‘swan (+baby.dim).’ This lexical specificity can be analyzed in terms of readjustment rules where both the undergoer and the trigger bear diacritic features. Each suffix can potentially bear multiple diacritics that go with separate rules: thus, both -onok and -at would be indexed for velar mutation, non-velar palatalization, etc. But -ok would be indexed for velar mutation only. Importantly, while -onok and -at share readjustment rule diacritics, they belong to different declension classes, as we show later—thus, their morpho-phonological diacritics overlap but are not identical.
], and 38 for [
]. About a third of the latter are scanning errors (where <
> appears in the context where <
> ‘assessments’ is expected); quite a few of the remaining ones are in older texts from the 19th century.
] ‘piglet’: the adult-root counterpart [
] occurs in the RNC a handful of times, but interestingly, only one of the uses means ‘piglet’; the rest are epithets for a young dirty boy.
in the nominative (and accusative) singular, and 
elsewhere. This declension is quite parallel to the class Ib en-stems, such as contemporary [
]∼ [imen-a] ‘name (+pl)’; the stem-final nasal vowel gave rise to an [
] alternation. Thanks to Michael Flier for discussion.
] ‘old men (baby.dim)’ and [
] ‘dudes (baby.dim)’ have one hit each, the former in a ‘poetic license’ context alongside other star-derived expressives referring to old men. ‘Boys’ does occur with -ata, [
] (14 RNC hits), though so does [
] ‘boy-
], [
] (both are double diminutives of sorts, formed on roots for ‘child’ or ‘baby’). See Sect. 
] ‘fist’ (3, 1871–1926) and [
] ‘coat’ (1, 1864)—but these are obsolete today. For animates, clear evaluative uses were few, ranging from 0 (
‘fool’) to 10 (
, mostly early 20th century). There were a few unsurprising baby diminutives for boys, [
] (28, early 1900s), [
] (25, modern). We discuss other evaluatives, such as pluralia tantum (e.g., [
] ‘poems’), in Sect. 
] and [
] do occur. So do regular, not purely evaluative, diminutives such as 
‘brother,’ and [
] ‘barracuda-dim.’ The latter form hints at another possible source of productivity differences: stress. In terms of stress, most productive diminutives and evaluatives that combine with feminine stems tend to be recessive, unaccented suffixes—not dominant auto-stressing, like -onok. Perhaps the pressure to keep stress on the base, not uncommon for diminutives could explain the difference (Gilbert 
] example. The reviewer suggests that this case is purely evaluative/dismissive, but in most internet hits, it seems that it is reserved for young followers of Navalny: 
. ‘Here, young navalʲnʲata—his followers and supporters—argue about Navalny with their 90-year-old grandpa Lev Aleksandrovich Martynov.’ (
‘
: Political jargon, dismissive. Young follower of Russian politician A.A. Navalny.’ (
-ok-onok-ok-a/ [
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Luke Adamson, Michael Flier, Itamar Kastner, Naomi Lee, and Alec Marantz, the reviewers at NLLT, Daniel Harbour, and the audiences at NYU, Harvard, Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 30, and Slavic Linguistic Society 16 for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this work.
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Gouskova, M., Bobaljik, J.D. The lexical core of a complex functional affix: Russian baby diminutive -onok. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 1075–1115 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09530-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09530-1